“Goodly Lord, what a wit-snapper are you!” (Merchant of Venice, III.v.45)

Oh, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah… UPDATE: Good news! False alarm!

Ace of Spades is liveblogging Sarah Palin’s rally in Carson, CA today. Says he will have pictures of the Carson crowd later. Jon Voigt was one of her openers, and he seems to have warmed up the crowd quite effectively. Browsing through what Ace catches of Palin’s speech once she does get up there (the over-capacity crowd loves her, of course), most of what she says sounds like a series of rote crowd-pleasers, which is standard for a rally of this type. Not all of it, though. A couple of exceptions:

1) The one that’s making it all over the news is her accusation that Barack Obama is “palling around with terrorists,” in reference to William Ayers (quote in video at about 1:35). That’s one way to get Ayers’s name back in the media; I’m guessing it was spurred at least in part by the NYTimes’swhitewash of Obama’s relationship to Ayers in today’s edition. (Instapundit has more; take note of his reader John’s email.) It’s a good thing that this line is turning into the newsmaker of the day, because it looks like it’s crowding out the other exception, which is the reason behind this post’s title.

2) This is just painful. Ace (via Gateway Pundit) reports Palin telling the crowd, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support women.” Oh, groooooan…! Thanks a heap, Governor. In one sentence, you’ve combined the most teeth-grinding rhetoric of both the left (emotional blackmail through identity politics) and the right (ranting that your opponents are hellbound). According to Ace: “Says she wasn’t sure how that would go over, wants to know how the media will twist it.”

That just makes my head hurt. Unbelievable…she even knows what a risk she was taking with that line. If the press actually does ignore that horror show of a sound bite in favor of her earlier “palling around with terrorists” line, she will have dodged a potentially lethal bullet, in my opinion.

Unforced errors like that for a candidate in her position are just way too stupid. It’s one thing to run a campaign against the media; it’s quite another to bait the media unnecessarily. Just ask Gary Hart.

UPDATE: Bless you, dear commenter ArmyWife (here, have a link!), who has informed me that Gov. Palin was deliberately cribbing a line from a fluffy TIME Magazine interview with Madeleine Albright from earlier this year. Whew! That is a huge load off my mind. Sorry, folks, Ace didn’t include that context; clearly liveblogging amid a huge crowd required brevity on his part. Sounds much better when used ironically, doesn’t it? (Also explains why the media folk aren’t pouncing on it.)

Looking back at Gateway Pundit’s post, I see I was remiss (distraught over the “special place” line, I guess!) in not giving Sarah due credit for one of the best lines of the campaign so far at Obama’s expense:

Just once it would be nice if he said he wanted our country to win!

She isn’t cracking up. She can still pop off a great one-liner. OK, fine, feels like I’m back from the Spock-has-a-beard universe now.

UPDATE II: Still no Ace photos, but here’s one from an Instapundit emailer:

Playing fair and square doesn’t work against crooked and dirty which everyone knows Obama is. People are just so anti-Republican that it’s going to take some almost Howard Stern (without the profanity) type of straight talk to make people see what that may be electing for the next four years. I’ve really admired your posts, but honestly, I think they’ve needed to stop playing nice for a long time. Women should support her. They’ve been whining long enough about women’s rights that they should embrace the fact the our next VP could be a woman. They believe a woman should have the right to choose and she has chose life, so get over it. She’s be a CEO of a State for goodness sake not many of us can claim that title. So she’s not a Democrate, big deal. She is a woman, she’s part of the sisterhood.

I know ArmyWife’s fortunate comment renders my complaint moot, but your point still bears response. It’s not a matter of “playing fair and square;” it’s a matter of playing smart. If she actually had said that line in the context I’d thought, she would have been transformed by the media into a snarling religious nut overnight, just in time for tomorrow’s front pages.

Of course women should vote for her, but not because she’s part of the sisterhood. That only perpetuates a hateful myth that a woman must join some sort of bizarre hive mind in order to be accepted by other women. (Ergo, my relief that she was speaking ironically.)

There’s a difference between running a campaign against the media, and needlessly baiting the media. Just ask Gary Hart.

@honeycat22: Sorry, I wasn’t clear! Didn’t mean to suggest that you yourself were pushing the “sisterhood” line.

Yes, the quote can easily be twisted the same way Charlie Gibson edited Palin’s church address to make it sound like she was saying the Iraq War is sanctioned by God (and then had the nerve to say those were her “exact words”). However, while they might get away for doing that to her once, I really doubt they’d be able to pull it off a second time in just a few weeks without embarrassing themselves and inadvertently helping her. Once can be written off as a blunder; twice makes a pattern.

I can’t see them deliberately converting this quote to its literal meaning, especially with the Albright quote out there.